What is John Vietnam Nguyen (JVN) Day?
JVN Day is a celebration of using Hip-Hop as a tool for community uplift. This year’s theme is Hope Alive. With all of the devastation and disparity currently experienced by communities who most embrace and engage the culture and genre of Hip-Hop, we want to remind everyone that there is still hope and it is very much alive.
We will start the day at 6 a.m. on the Mendota Terrace of UW-Madison, with a SUNRISE SERVICE recognizing the the life of John Vietnam Nguyen (JVN), a brother, leader, and the epitome of what it meant to use Hip Hop as a tool for social change.
We will then move to the Sellery Basketball courts at 770 W. Dayton St. to kick off our ELEMENTS IN THE PARK festival. Here, you will be able to engage the elements and history of Hip Hop, hands on! You don’t want to miss out. There will be food, music, and good vibes. We will wrap up this celebration with a CIPHER at 2pm.
At 5 p.m. we will move from there to Union South’s Northwoods Room for our Gatekeepers Ceremony. Here we will also be recognizing and celebrating the life, love, and fierce of NAKILA ROBINSON.
At 9 p.m., we will have a concert on the terrace stage featuring internationally renowned recording artists REBEL DIAZ. You will also see acts like Smiley Gatmouth, Lord of the Fly, and CRASHprez.
Finally, at 12 a.m., We will wrap up the day with an after party featuring, the very popular ALEX WILEY at the Play circle Theater in memorial union.
What better way to spend your Saturday?
What is Hip-Hop Culture?
“Originally Hip-Hop was a genre and a culture born of groups of people who happened to be poor and happened to be in areas of the Northeast,” ” when they were deprived of very basic needs like arts in their schools or adequate housing. It was a response, it’s making something out of nothing,” said JVN Day committee member Rina Sanders. “It turned into more, it became a tool with which people could become activists. Young people, young brown people, who barely had anything, but were fighting for their neighborhoods and for their basic needs.”
“If you tear down our homes to build a train system through it, we’re going to mark it up with all the spare things we can find, the spray paint in the basement, you know? If we don’t have dance lessons we’re going to through this piece of cardboard down on the floor and spin on that for a while. And because poverty breeds so many things, one of them being violence-stricken neighborhoods, people found a new way to battle each other without guns — that’s when the cypher was born,” Sanders said. “That’s when battle rap was born. That’s when B-Boys decided to break against each other. Hip-Hop is literally a product of not having anything, but still wanting to survive. We needed to uplift each other, we didn’t have a choice.”
“But now I don’t think the need is there as much in terms of those who share in the genre and that’s one of the many theories of why Hip-Hop looks the way it does right now. Capitalism and exploitation definitely played a part in that when larger companies realized that money could be made off of Hip-Hop and that it was profitable. Then it became something dangerous and it began to hurt the people who engaged in it.”
“That’s just Hip-Hop’s history. JVN Day is a way to teach that history without the resources to speak to every kid in Madison — though it would be nice. We have JVN Day when we have almost 24 hours to remind folks what Hip-Hop really is.”
